Tag Archive for Altor Networks

Since Juniper bought Altor Networks, there has been steady progress to use Altor VF3 (now Juniper vGW, pronounced vee-Gee-W) as a way to extend the functionality of the Juniper SRX Series of Service Gateways into the virtual and cloud environments. Juniper is focusing on the entire security stack from the endpoint to the hypervisor, vGW offers one component of that entire picture. Another component is the Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite which provides Security as a Service for mobile devices. These two components alone are a very powerful set of tools for any Enterprise. When you add in the other components it is a compelling story from network security perspective.

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My conference schedule kept pace with the changes in the virtualization security ecosystem through out the year. What are those changes? This is the end of year review of the virtualization security ecosystem.

Virtualization Security was one of the BIG Deals at VMworld with several announcements:

* VMware vShield Edge, App, and End Point * Trend Micro will have the first product making use of vShield End Point * Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) * HyTrust and their growing list of technology partners

But the biggest news is that Virtualization Security is finally on the radar of most if not all C-level as it is now seen as the gate to entering the cloud. But before we can solve the cloud security issue we have to solve the virtualization security issues. VMware’s announcement has the most impact on the virtualization security ecosystem. At once they are competing head-to-head with some vendors while providing a platform to use for other vendors.

The security companies are looking into all aspects of virtual environment introspection to label, tag, or mark all objects for compliance reasons, inspect the contents of virtual machines for asset management (CMDB), and an early form of Root Kit detection.

Virtualization Security is not just about the firewall, it is about the entire ecosystem, auditing, compliance, and object management.

Virtualization Security vendors are starting to seriously investigate the possibilities of the various introspection APIs available to the hypervisors. Introspection APIs allow security groups to now investigate the security of a virtual network, virtual machine, and other components from without. In other words, why rely on an agent within the VM to protect your network, virtual machine, or components. Instead, we can use these APIs to peer into these components from without the system to be tested.

While at RSA Conference I visited the RSA Innovation Sandbox and noticed that three out of ten virtualization security vendors were finalists:

* Altor Networks * Catbird Security * HyTrust

Alto Networks won the Innovation Sandbox contest and all that goes with it. Congratulations to them, but Altor’s win is actually a win for all virtualization security players. It shows that virtualization security is extremely important to the data center as well as moving forward to the cloud.